How We Improved Our Sales Workflow with Slack

We use Slack a lot at Keen IO. We’re constantly using and building Slack integrations to improve our workflow. We’re actually kind of obsessed. We realized we needed a way to aid our sales and customer success workflows on Slack, so we built a tool that lets people type a command that looks like this: /company slack.com. And pulls up a response like this:

The company info is retrieved from Clearbit’s API. This has been incredibly useful for our Sales and Customer Success teams when they need to look up information about a new signup or an existing customer.

We’ve open sourced all of the code on Github. If you want to use this integration for your own company just follow these steps:

What You’ll  Need

• Clearbit
• Pushpop Instance (an open source plug-in for scheduled integrations between services)
• Slack

Follow These Steps

1. Grab your Clearbit API key
2. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook (you can reuse an existing one)
3. Copy the webhook URL – you’ll need that later
4. Create a Slack slash command. Preferably /company for the command. The URL should point to your Pushpop instance, on the /slack/company path. Copy the Token – you’ll need that later
5. Create a new job in your Pushpop instance, using the company info source.
6. Add all of the environment variables:
   1. CLEARBIT_KEY is the Clearbit API key from Step 1
   2. SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL is the webhook URL from Step 2
   3. SLACK_TOKEN_COMPANY is the slash command token from Step 3
7. Restart Pushpop (make sure you’re running pushpop as a webserver)
8. Type /company keen.io into Slack!

Look Up Individual People

We can also look up information on individual people.

This creates a slash command that will retrieve info about a person (via email address) from Clearbit, and send it back in to Slack.

The person info will look like this in Slack:

Setting Up the /Person Command

1. Grab your Clearbit API key
2. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook (you can reuse an existing one)
3. Copy the webhook URL – you’ll need that later
4. Create a Slack slash command Preferably /person for the command
5. The URL should point to your Pushpop instance, on the /slack/person path. Copy the Token – you’ll need that later
6. Create a new job in your Pushpop instance, using the person info source.
7. Add all of the environment variables
   1. CLEARBIT_KEY is the Clearbit API key from Step 1
   2. SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL is the webhook URL from Step 2
   3. SLACK_TOKEN_COMPANY is the slash command token from Step 3
8. Restart Pushpop (make sure you’re running pushpop as a webserver)
9. Type /person [email protected] into slack!

That’s it! Check it out on github to learn more. If you have any questions or ideas of your own drop by our community Slack channel.